Cara Delevingne Opens Up About Being Depressed as a Teenager

Cara Delevingne stuns in a silver skirt and thigh-high boots on the cover of Net-A-Porter‘s digital magazine The Edit.

In the magazine, the 25-year-old model turned actress gets candid about her mental health.

On being depressed as a teen: “I hated myself for being depressed, I hated feeling depressed, I hated feeling. I was very good at disassociating from emotion completely. And all the time I was second-guessing myself, saying something and then hating myself for saying it. I didn’t understand what was happening apart from the fact that I didn’t want to be alive anymore.”

On talking about mental health issues: “When I tried to talk to people about it, they wouldn’t want to understand. So many of my friends would say: ‘How can you feel like that?’ and, ‘But you’re so lucky,’ and I’d be like: I know, trust me, I know. I know I’m the luckiest girl in the world, I understand all of these things, and I wish I could appreciate it. There is just something dark within me I cannot seem to shake.”

On learning to be happy on her own: “At the moment, it’s just being in a relationship with myself. I was always in love with my best friends, the person I would call if something was wrong, the person that I talked to about everything. But when someone gets too close, I get scared: ‘Oh, you can’t handle it, I’m too crazy.’ I know it sounds really stupid, but I relied too much on love, too much on other people to make me happy, and I needed to learn to be happy by myself. So now I can be by myself, I can be happy. It took me a long time.”